T. H. White is best known for his transformations of stories of the past. His four-volume masterpiece, The Once and Future King (1958), gives new life to the works of Sir Thomas Malory, and White also retells, or provides sequels for, stories told by such writers as Jonathan Swift, William Shakespeare, and the anonymous author of the biblical story of the Flood. In addition, his diaries and journals, such as England Have My Bones (1936), which he wrote during the years when he first determined to earn his living as a writer, not only have considerable narrative interest in themselves but also can be read as sources for his contributions to English fiction. Terence Hansbury White was born on 29 May 1906 in Bombay, India, to Garrick Hansbury White, a district superintendent of police, and Constance Edith Southcote Aston White, the daughter of a judge. In 1911, suffering from a stomach infection, he was taken to St. Leonards, East Sussex, where his maternal grandparents lived. He remained with them when his parents returned to India -- his father in 1914, followed by his mother in 1915.

White began his formal education in 1920 at Cheltenham College, a public school with a longstanding Anglo-Indian connection and a strong military program. In the summer of 1923 he received a certificate with credits in English, history, geography, French, and mathematics. In January of that year Constance White had been granted a separation from her alcoholic husband on grounds of cruelty; she returned to England and began, with the help of a cousin and her recently graduated son, to attempt to make a living as a pig and poultry farmer. She later wrote that she found herself unable, because she lacked the penny to pay for a stamp, to respond to a letter from her son's former headmaster saying that she must by "hook or crook . . . manage to send my boy to a University."

"The Man," an autobiographical short story collected in The Maharajah and Other Stories (1981), is based on this period in White's life. White's sense of injustice at being forced to postpone his university education becomes apparent when his alter ego, Nicky, says that though he "hated the muscular man [his mother's cousin], and hated the arid chicken farm, and hated work, and hated his school, where he ought to be a prefect but was not, he hid these feelings and was ashamed of them and did not recognize them." Nicky's impulse -- and White's, too, one can imagine -- is to "read himself away, into a less real world."

White spent a year tutoring and was able to enter Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1925. By the end of the year he had earned a scholarship. He made his way back from a trip to Lapland to find he had succeeded brilliantly in his spring examinations. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1927, he spent four months in a sanatorium and was then enabled by the generosity of a group of dons to go to Italy for his health. He was advised to "degrade" -- that is, to postpone his examinations for a year -- but he insisted on taking them and did not perform particularly well. Nevertheless, he wrote what his director of studies considered to be a wild and funny essay on Malory.

In Italy, White began They Winter Abroad (1932), wrote several Saturday Review articles, and contracted with Chatto and Windus for a book of poems. In 1929 he graduated with distinction from Cambridge; Chatto and Windus published Loved Helen and Other Poems; and his thirty-three-line The Green Bay Tree; or, The Wicked Man Touches Wood appeared in a Cambridge poets series. The first poems of Loved Helen and Other Poems show White's debt to poets of the English Renaissance, while The Green Bay Tree is deliberately imitative of the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins. White continued to write poems for the rest of his life; he sent them in letters to friends, included them in his journals, and incorporated them into his fiction.

In 1930, though he did not consider it worthy of a man who had just graduated from Cambridge with distinction, White took a position as a Latin teacher at St. David's preparatory school in Reigate Hunting, in the south of England. During his two years there he wrote two detective novels (he called them "blood stories") to make money: Dead Mr. Nixon (1931), co-authored with Roland McNair Scott, and Darkness at Pemberley (1932), both of which include academic characters. In addition, he completed They Winter Abroad and worked on First Lesson (1932), which were published under the pseudonym James Aston. Both of the Aston novels are set in Italy. The first is a comedy about a group of unlikely candidates for love who are spending the winter there; the second focuses on Belfry, a forty-seven-year-old don who loses his virginity during a sabbatical year in Italy.

In 1932 White lost his teaching position but found a new one at Stowe, a public school that occupied the grounds of a famous country house in Buckinghamshire. At Stowe, in pursuit of gentility, he learned to ride, hunt, and fish; and, partly to overcome his fear, he learned to fly an airplane. At this time White laid aside "Rather Rum," a never-to-be-completed Aston novel, and wrote Farewell Victoria (1933), in which he shows his growing understanding of nature and respect for simple country people. Farewell Victoria, which focuses on Mundy, a humble horse groom, encompasses a period from 1858 to 1933.

Earth Stopped; or, Mr. Marx's Sporting Tour (1934), a second novel written during this period, deals with people like Mundy in just one brief chapter that tells how country people teach a young Marxist (who has named himself Marx) to "stop earth," or fill in the tunnels into which hunted animals could escape. It is primarily concerned with the antics of the house guests of the tenth Earl of Scamperdale and ends with a bombing, from an unidentified source, of such proportions that the earth itself seems to have stopped. Its sequel, Gone to Ground; or, The Sporting Decameron (1935), is a collection of stories told by survivors of this bombing at the end of a social order.

England Have My Bones, published in 1936, is an engaging series of observations by a highly educated man -- who acknowledges the impediments imposed by this status -- engaged in the upper-class pursuits of hunting, fishing, and shooting. The chronological series of entries goes far beyond the tedious, repetitive quality of the how-to-hunt, how-to-shoot, how-to-fish sequences of Burke's Steerage; or, The Amateur Gentleman's Introduction to Noble Sports and Pastimes (1938), a lifeless book apparently written solely because White had an obligation to his publisher. England Have My Bones includes references to White's love of flying and his schoolboy fear of ridicule and ends with an account of the March 1935 accident that wrecked his Bentley and left him temporarily half blind. White earned enough from sales of the book to resign his position at Stowe School, move into a gamekeeper's cottage on the grounds, and pursue writing full time.

White unabashedly presents poverty as his reason for writing The Goshawk (1951) during the time he was composing the diary entries that became England Have My Bones. When he left his second teaching position, his resources, White tells his readers as he introduces the story of his attempt to train the bird he calls Gos, consisted of one hundred pounds, and rent for the cottage in Stowe Ridings in which he was living was five shillings a week. The Goshawk was a considerable success but did not solve White's immediate financial problems, since it was not published until 1951. Wren Howard, a representative of the firm of Jonathan Cape who was visiting White in connection with another manuscript, discovered the bulky record of "failure."

The Sword in the Stone (1938) began to earn White the literary fame on which his reputation now rests. Here, as John K. Crane points out in his critical study T. H. White (1974), White was able to represent himself in both Merlyn, "the man who thought more about daily existence and its ultimate meaning than most of his contemporaries," and Arthur, "the boy who could never learn enough to place the entire human experience, in its multitudinous forms, in a unified perspective." The first sentences of the book detail the study schedule followed by "the Wart," as Arthur is known in his boyhood, and Kay, the son of Wart's guardian, Sir Ector: "On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition, and Astrology. In the afternoons the programme was: Mondays and Fridays, tilting and horsemanship; Tuesdays, hawking; Wednesdays, fencing; Thursdays, archery; Saturdays, the theory of chivalry, with the proper measures to be blown on all occasions, terminology of the chase and etiquette." Sir Ector keeps a sparrow hawk named Cully, who can think and who speaks a demented Shakespearean English, for the village priest. Kay and the Wart take the hawk out of the mews and lose it; pursuing it into the Forest Sauvage, Wart meets the comical King Pellinore, who is in perpetual pursuit of the Questing Beast, and comes upon the cottage of the magician Merlyn, who knows the future because he lives backward in time. Merlyn becomes the boys' tutor. Guided by Merlyn, Wart learns about life by being transformed into a fish, an ant, a hawk, a wild goose, a snake, and a badger. Merlyn also sends Kay and the Wart on an adventure, during which they meet Robin Hood (here called "Robin Wood"), Maid Marian, and Little John.

Word comes that the king, Uther Pendragon, has died without an heir. Shortly thereafter, Sir Ector; Kay, who is preparing to become a knight; and Wart, who is serving as his squire, go to London, where Kay is to participate in a joust. Realizing that he has left his sword at the Castle Sauvage, Kay sends Wart back for it, but Wart finds that Kay's room is locked. Returning to London, he comes upon a sword stuck through an anvil on a stone in a churchyard. Using the wisdom he gained from Merlin, he pulls it out and takes it to Kay. Kay recognizes that it is the sword from the stone that bears the inscription "Whoso Pulleth Out the Sword of the Stone and Anvil, is Rightwise King Born of All England." After first claiming that it was he who pulled out the sword, Kay confesses the truth, and Wart becomes King Arthur.

In 1939 White, who had been trying to decide whether to maintain his pacifist beliefs or join the army to fight the Nazis, deferred the decision and moved to Ireland. There he boarded with Paddy and Lena McDonagh in Doolistown.

White's biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner says that writing The Sword in the Stone enabled White to have "a dauntless, motherless boyhood" as Wart and an "ideal old age" as Merlyn. The Witch in the Wood (1939), on the other hand, seems to have grown from the boyhood White actually had.

White's hatred of his mother's suffocating attentions, of which he wrote in letters to friends such as his former Cambridge tutor, L. J. Potts, remains evident in the opening chapters -- even though, on the advice of Potts and the orders of his publisher, he made substantial changes from the manuscript he originally submitted. In the first chapter Gawaine, Gaheris, Gareth, and Agravain, four brothers who will play major roles in the destruction of the Round Table, are introduced as children huddled together in a cold bedroom that has no bed, telling the story of King Uther Pendragon and their grandmother Igraine, as their mother, Queen Morgause of Lothian and Orkney, stirs her boiling kettle of revenge (literally and figuratively) in the room below. White comments on the boys' oath of undying loyalty to their mother: "Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically -- to those who hardly think about us in return." When the brothers kill and dismember a unicorn in their effort to please Morgause, she does not even deign to look at the bleeding head they bring home for her. The young King Arthur is more fortunate: Merlyn continues to act as his adviser as he prepares for the wars that will establish his authority as ruler of an extended kingdom. Merlyn is often presented as a comic figure, but his political awareness is astute. He clenches his fists and shakes all over when Kay advocates imposing what is good for people on them by force. Merlyn, who "lives backward in time," knows about Adolf Hitler, "the Austrian . . . who tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos," and he teaches his student that victories gained through the deaths of men who do not belong to the knightly class are not cause for unqualified rejoicing. The Witch in the Wood ends with a genealogical chart showing that the triumphant young King Arthur, son of Igraine and Uther Pendragon, lay with Morgause, the daughter of Igraine and her husband, the earl of Cornwall, resulting in the birth of Mordred.

The Ill-Made Knight (1940) is the story of Lancelot, who thus labels himself because of his ugly face. He and his tutor, Uncle Dap, go to Camelot, and the story of Lancelot and Arthur and Guenever begins to unfold. If one reads Lancelot's behavior in the context of what White says about his own sadistic impulses, it is possible to see that this novel, like the one that preceded it, is semi-autobiographical: Lancelot, like White, "liked to hurt people," knew that it was wrong, and never "committed a cruel action which he could have prevented." The Ill-Made Knight falls in love with Queen Guenever when he sees that his rudeness about her ineptness with a falcon has hurt her; then he determines to leave Camelot to avoid hurting Arthur, whom he loved first and continues to love. Since he is destined to become "the best knight in the world," Lancelot's attempt to escape from love leads to a series of triumphs over lesser knights that provide White the opportunity for digressions about medieval armor, jousts, and tournaments. In the process the old ethics of "might makes right" is transformed into a new ethics of might for right. But because of the human weakness of "the Orkney faction," of which Gawaine, Gaheris, Agravaine, and Gareth are the key members, the noble ideals that led to the formation of the Round Table remain far from realization. Lancelot, like Arthur before him, is tricked into fathering a child; but Galahad, Lancelot's son by Elaine, who pretends to be Guenever, will live to see the Holy Grail.

Basic elements of the plot of The Ill-Made Knight can be found in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485). What cannot be found in Malory are the rounded characterizations provided by White. In a long digression Guenever is shown to have a seventh sense, which, White explains, follows the acquisition of a sixth sense, the sense of balance. The seventh sense is the means by which "both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, stultification and hypocrisy." Lancelot has not reached this degree of maturity; but he can reveal to Guenever, and to no one else, his boyhood ambition to become a great healer or to find something of tremendous value, such as the Holy Grail. Arthur's education is shown to be inadequate to the challenges he will face; indeed, it will be a handicap in an imperfect world. And yet, he is a more believable human being than the Arthur in Malory: a man who clings tenaciously to his belief that one can live according to a code of virtue in a less than perfect world.

White does not slavishly follow his source. He selects; he explains; he heightens the drama; and he makes skillful use of Geoffrey Chaucer's device of occupatio, which permits a narrator to insert detail even as he claims to be avoiding digression, as when he says, "If you want to read about the beginning of the Quest for the Grail, about the wonders of Galahad's arrival . . . and of the last supper at court, when the thunder came and the sunbeam and the covered vessel and the sweet smell through the Great Hall -- if you want to read about these, you must seek them in Malory." He undercuts Galahad's virtue with reports that he played with dolls as a child and said "it is perfectly all right killing people who had not been christened." As for the transformation of Lancelot, White deepens readers' perception of the ill-made knight's sense of his failure to serve his God and his king and to protect his queen with a wistful look back to a past when adults loved faithfully to the end of their lives and with a final vision of Lancelot's tears that uses Malory's words: "And ever . . . Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten."

The fourth part of White's Arthurian tetralogy, The Candle in the Wind, first appeared in 1958, when all four parts were published in one volume as The Once and Future King (here The Witch in the Wood is retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness). This part begins with Morgause's fifth son, Mordred, whose anger is directed toward Arthur, his father, leading Agravaine, whose anger is directed at Guenever, toward revenge for wrongs suffered before they were born. Gawaine attempts to reason with Mordred, who cannot be dissuaded. The scene shifts to Sir Lancelot and Guenever as aging lovers; Guenever, the wiser of the two, doubts that Arthur can continue to conceal his awareness of their relationship. Arthur enters this scene of domestic tranquillity to tell the two people he loves most about his fatherhood of Mordred, confess his guilt for attempting to kill Mordred by ordering the drowning of all the babies born at the same time as his son, and warn them of the threat posed by Mordred. Gawaine refuses to join his brothers in rebellion against his king and takes Gareth and Gaheris with him as he leaves the court. Mordred confronts Arthur with the adultery of Lancelot and Guenever, and Agravaine forces the king to agree that if Lancelot is found in Guenever's room while Arthur is away on a hunting trip, the knights have permission to take the two prisoner. Lancelot kills Agravaine when the plotters burst into the room but spares Mordred. Gawaine, his loyalties deeply divided, cannot take either side. Gareth and Gaheris stand by their king, but, also loyal to Lancelot, do so unarmed. Lancelot rescues Guenever but, to his regret, kills the unarmed brothers. Guenever and Lancelot escape.

As the old story plays itself out, a fascinating additional story emerges as a result of White's decision to keep much of a text he first intended to produce as a play. Gawaine confronts King Arthur with a summary of what has happened: "the pure and fearless Knight of the Lake, whom you have allowed to cuckold you and carry off your wife, amused himself before he left by murdering my two brothers -- both unarmed, and both his loving friends." Guenever, addressing Lancelot, proposes a way to move past the present impasse toward peace: whatever personal pain their submission may entail, the combatants can appeal to the Pope and abide by his judgment, administered by the bishop of Rochester. She then turns to her lover "with a face of composure and relief -- the efficient and undramatic face which women achieve when they have nursing to do or some other employment of efficiency." White's narrative voice then breaks in to express a wisdom that can be gained only by living long enough in an imperfect world: this is the way the world is; the honorable course of action is to recognize and accept it and do the best one can.

Lancelot is banished by order of the bishop of Rochester. Mordred, mad, decides that the proper revenge for his incestuous birth is to seize his father's wife for himself. Gawaine is killed in battle, and Arthur is left to try to reason things out for himself. Merlyn is not available to help the king; he remains in the cave in which Nimue imprisoned him. The old king thinks about Morgause, his half sister; his early wars; his -- and White's -- persistent questions about why men fight; possessiveness and greed. The fourth book of the tetralogy ends with a conversation between Arthur and a boy named Tom Malory. Arthur knights him Sir Thomas Malory and entrusts him with the task of telling the story of "regis quondam regisque futuri," the once and future king.

White wrote a fifth book to conclude the tragedy of King Arthur and present an antidote to war, but wartime paper shortages precluded its publication; the manuscript was found among his papers after his death, and The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King was finally published in 1977. When he reappears in the book that bears his name, Merlyn cites a list of sources, beginning with Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth and ending with Henry Purcell, Aubrey Beardsley, and White himself (he could have included Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe if he had truly been gifted with the power of prophecy), to assure the king that they will not be forgotten. Then a new descent into Arthur's past begins. Arthur and Merlyn find themselves in a burrow inhabited by the badger who initiated Wart into the wisdom of the animals; the wise owl, Archimedes; Balin, the merlin; a goat (a creature who did not appear in the transformation series of The Sword and the Stone); the king's dog, Cavall; and a humble hedgehog who had begged Wart to spare him when they first met. The animals engage in a rambling discussion of the faults of capitalism, the inadequacies of communism, and the arrogance of the human species. Arthur also revisits the ants, with whom he explores the ideas that can be thought or communicated in a language limited to a minimal number of binary oppositions. With additions that draw attention to the present age of the king (who is not, in the judgment of his animal friends, so old that he is no longer teachable), White retells the story of Wart's transformation into a goose. This retelling, embellished with didactic detail, is clearly intended to serve as preparation for the king's next lesson, but Arthur is not yet ready to learn it. At this point he needs not more political philosophizing but the encouragement of the hedgehog, who has had to sit apart from the other animals because of his fleas. As they respond to the freshness of the English countryside, the hedgehog leads Arthur back to a recognition of his own responsibility, to a sense of what it means -- or should mean -- to be a king. He tries to make peace with Mordred; but one of Arthur's soldiers lifts his sword to defend himself against a grass snake, Mordred's army interprets the action as an attack on them, and Arthur is killed in the ensuing battle. Guenever, still wiser than Lancelot, persuades her lover that what will be best for him now is total commitment to the service of God and then retires to a convent, where she will rule "efficiently, royally, with a sort of grand contempt . . . her linen clean and fine and scented against the rules of her order." White closes The Book of Merlyn with a scholarly citation of the many sources that assert that Arthur will come again.

In 1945 White returned to England and took up residence at Duke Mary's, a cottage in Yorkshire owned by his friend David Garnett. There he wrote Mistress Masham's Repose (1946), a sequel to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). After Lemuel Gulliver's departure from Lilliput in the eighteenth century his associate, Captain Biddel, captures some of the "little people" and takes them back to England, where he puts them on exhibit. The Lilliputians escape when Captain Biddel gets drunk during a visit to Malplaquet, a grand country house, and are carried by a jackdaw that they have raised to an island called Mistress Masham's Repose in the middle of a lake on the grounds of the house. There they establish an ideal society in exile. Notably, their society has no revealed religion (the Big Endian controversy of Gulliver's Travels is ended). There are no longer any wars since they have no enemies to fight; families are governed by the mothers; and they all believe that "the most important thing in the world [is] to find out what one like[s] to do, and then do it" (considering White's interests as he expressed them in earlier publications, it is not surprising that two of those things are hunting and fishing). The Lilliputians' ideal educational system helps children learn "Natural History . . . their own History . . . Oeconomy and anything else which dealt with being alive."

In the twentieth century Malplaquet has fallen into a state of decay (the setting bears a strong resemblance to the landscape and architecture of Stowe school). It is now occupied by Maria, a ten-year-old orphan; her guardian, the vicar Mr. Hater; and Miss Brown, a governess who is "cruel in a complicated way." Maria has two friends: a good-hearted cook with the gift of common sense and a professor who can write only in a twelfth-century style. Maria discovers the descendants of the original Lilliputians and wants to "help" them; she decides, for example, that a fisherman must become an aviator. Her desire to control their lives causes her to race toward ruin "with the speed of a Rake's Progress." The professor becomes aware that he has a teaching responsibility. Calling on Gulliver's experience in Brobdingnag, the land of the giants, he makes her aware of what it is like to be defenseless and made captive. Aided by the cook and the Lilliputians, he rescues Maria from imprisonment by the vicar and Miss Brown, who are trying to steal her inheritance. Finally, stepping out of the world of his fiction at the end of the novel, White speaks directly to David and Ray Garnett's daughter, Amaryllis, telling her that it is still possible to visit the place where the people of the story once lived.

In 1946 White moved to Jersey in the Channel Islands; the following year he moved to another of the islands, Alderney, where he lived for the rest of his life. "Mr. White," the narrator of his next novel, The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947), describes himself "standing in his workshop, or playroom, with his spectacles on the end of his nose and a small oilcan in his hand . . . a tall, middle-aged man, with gray hair and a straggling beard." The description corresponds to White's actual appearance when he lived in Doolistown with the McDonaghs, who recognized themselves as the O'Callaghans of the novel, a not-very-bright Irish Catholic couple. White explains, "Since this is the story of an Ark, it might be fair to say that Mr. White was the elephant, Mrs. O'Callaghan the kangaroo," presumably because of their irreconcilable viewpoints.

The archangel Gabriel comes down the O'Callaghans' chimney and announces that the world is to be destroyed again in a second great flood -- a contradiction of the Old Testament promise that there would never be another flood like the one that covered the earth in Noah's time. Mr. White challenges his employee Pat Geraghty's ability to believe in the possibility of a second flood, thus making it certain that Geraghty, who always behaves contrary to expectations, will believe that it could happen. He then challenges Geraghty's ability to build an ark, and Geraghty responds by asserting both his belief in the archangel's prophecy and his confidence that he can construct the vessel. Mrs. O'Callaghan expresses her concern about how they will live after the flood is over, but if it means living on grass for a while, as Mr. White assures her that representatives of her species have done before, then she can do it. After all, she has consumed "nittles" (nettles) as a natural remedy. She does not, however, understand how she and her husband, who have been childless up to now, can be expected to be fruitful and multiply. As it turns out, there is no time to build a proper ark; the O'Callaghans' barn will have to do. And there is just time enough to load books that describe the nonlocal animals, but not to collect the animals themselves, before the barn gets up, like an elephant standing on its hind legs, turns upside down, and sails down the River Liffey to Dublin, with the O'Callaghans, Mr. White, his dog Brownie, and a few local species on board. The ark, however, turns out not to be seaworthy; when it crashes against a bridge, the occupants continue floating to Dublin on barrels used as life preservers. White recalls his primary source -- Genesis, chapters 6 through 9 -- with an effective concluding sentence: "It was a perfect rainbow."

Two nonfiction products of White's research into the eighteenth century, The Age of Scandal: An Excursion through a Minor Period and The Scandalmonger, appeared in 1950 and 1952, respectively. In the introduction to the first book White laments his discovery, on his last visit to Cambridge, that the masters now had to help with the washing up after lunch and speaks of his vicarious enjoyment of "the grand old days of Horace Walpole" and his intention to "give one last, loving and living picture of an aristocratic civilization which we shall never see again."

The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century Made and Edited by T. H. White followed his two eighteenth-century studies in 1954. The notes for White's bestiary are as copious as the text, and White wrote in a letter to Potts that they were drawn from thirty years of reading. He also told Potts that he considered the task of "translating the twelfth-century Bestiary out of illegible, abbreviated dog-latin into English" a task of "real scholarship," though he did not expect Cambridge to agree that his three scholarly books ought to earn him "a D. Litt. or Ph.D. or whatever it is." His judgment of The Book of Beasts would seem to be justified. It has a ten-page bibliography that includes manuscripts in the possession of learned societies that have never been published. His notes include everybody from Aristotle to "the American magazine called Life." His more than 125 illustrations are drawn from medieval manuscripts, and his twenty-page appendix, with its "Family Tree" and a diagram that shows the influence of the bestiary tradition on literary works, gives extended attention to the tradition to which he was making a major contribution.

With The Master: An Adventure Story (1957), a young-adult novel, White again demonstrates his skill as a master of the twice-told tale. The work to which he gives new life in The Master is Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611). The island that provides a setting for the action of White's The Master, however, could hardly be more different from the island, teeming with life, to which Shakespeare brings his shipwrecked characters. Rockall, the setting for The Master, cannot sustain life on its own. The aptly named island -- it is "all rock" -- houses a helicopter hangar on its top level and a reception room, men's quarters, offices, engines, and water tank on lower levels. Life here is totally dependent on twentieth-century technology. Other reversals of Shakespeare's plot follow. In The Tempest Prospero intentionally delivers his erstwhile enemies to his magic island; but Nicky and Judy, the twelve-year-old twin protagonists of The Master, are accidentally left on Rockall. Miranda, Prospero's daughter, is an obedient child; but Judy, though she lacks the power to resist the will of the Master -- who, like Prospero, completely controls the life of his island -- asserts her defiance when she is denied the education her brother receives. Judy is, she says, "not a Plaything To Be Cast Aside, but a Person to Be Reckoned With, who has Made Discoveries, so there." Frinton, the counterpart in the novel to Prospero's spirit servant, Ariel, is the helicopter pilot who brings what the Master needs to extend his 157-year life; but he later takes on a subversive role. And the storm that comes at the beginning of The Tempest occurs at the end of The Master.

Perhaps White found a point of departure in Alonso's comment in The Tempest (act 3, scene 3, lines 47-50) about shapes, gestures, and sounds "expressing, / Although they want the use of tongue, a kind / Of excellent dumb discourse" for the character Pinkie, a black cook who is incapable of communication by any means other than gesture. Another character, Mr. Blenkinsop, a Chinaman, explains that the Master had Pinkie's tongue cut out because Pinkie's ability to think for himself was a threat to the Master's control. The Chinaman's language, which lacks nouns and verbs, has helped the Master to move from English, governed by rules, to a simpler language with which he could directly control his subjects, without words.

Another character, Dr. Totty McTurk, has the responsibility of keeping the Master sane. McTurk's guiding principle is that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind. For the strong-minded Master, however, it is difficult to maintain the balance, leading to a further reversal of the norms of The Tempest: Shakespeare's Stephano and Trinculo, when drunk, lose a degree of control over language. The Master, on the other hand, has progressed so far in studying language that he must be a bit intoxicated to communicate his wishes to those who have not attained his level of linguistic expertise.

The Master wants to take over the world in order to prevent a nuclear war: U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, British prime minister Anthony Eden, and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev have atomic bombs, while, as Frinton tells the children, "most politicians can barely sign their names or read a comic strip." As a hurricane begins, Nicky raises a revolver to shoot the Master; but his resistance to the power of the Master's mind is overcome, and he drops the weapon. The Master steps backward, accidentally treading on the children's dog, Jokey. After she bites him, the Master falls and breaks his hip. As he begins a farewell speech in the high style of Shakespeare's Prospero -- "Now my charms are all o'erthrown . . ." -- his would-be boy assassin asks, "Are you hurt? Can I help"" The book ends as Nicky and Judy are reunited with their parents.

The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959) is a rambling account of White's travels in western Ireland. Responding to a question from "Bunny" (David Garnett) about his bird-training experience, White recalls a friend's kestrel, the hawks of The Goshawk, two merlins, and the birds at Fraoch, a shooting lodge on the west coast of Ireland. Mention of the Inniskea Disaster of 1927, in which ten lives were lost at sea, leads into White's account of his own solitary sojourn on one of the Inniskea Islands. There a stone idol, the Godstone, stood before the time of St. Patrick. White includes a poem about the Godstone; he admits that it has some inaccuracies, but he insists that the words cannot be changed because the rhymes are right. He then relates the responses to a questionnaire on the stone, which was administered by children, who, he assumed, were more likely to get answers from their elders than he was. This more scientific approach yields such "facts" as that the stone could render barren ground capable of producing potatoes but not other crops and that it was the pillow of an early Christian hermit. White moves from the etymology of Gaelic names for the cranes of Inniskea to consideration of their migration routes and then to the Latin bestiarists, who, he says, are as bad as the country people when one wants to find answers to serious scholarly questions. The birds of The Godstone and the Blackymor, like the birds of White's Arthurian fiction, are visualized in human terms: the barnacle geese of Inneskea have "the same black shiny gloves, the jet beads, the dress of black and dove gray garnished with white" that he associates with the spinster aunts of his childhood. There is thus no sharp distinction between bird and human, and other oppositions collapse as well. A superior-inferior distinction crumbles when the courtesy of a Nigerian masseur and patent-medicine salesman, James Montgomery-Majoribanks, the "Blackymor" of the title, is graciously expressed in a note of thanks for "overpayment" for his having restored a temporary flexibility to the rheumatic joints of two elderly Irishmen. The superior knowledge of a sixty-year-old dog handler, a man without formal education, also becomes apparent. Mrs. O'Callaghan of The Elephant and the Kangaroo briefly reappears in the penultimate chapter, "fervent, loving, tall, thin, humble, and frequently exclaiming that everything was 'loverlay,'" as White acknowledges that English assumptions of superiority to the Irish are baseless. The Godstone and the Blackymor does not apologize to the McDonaghs of Doolistown, who did not forgive White for the ungrateful ridicule of The Elephant and the Kangaroo, but it does acknowledge the dignity of people with whom White spent six years of his life.

White traveled in Italy from November 1962 to February 1963, and from September through December 1963 he lectured at colleges and universities across the United States. The resounding success of his American tour was undoubtedly based to some degree on the fame that the stage and screen adaptations of his Arthuriad -- the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot (1960) and the animated Walt Disney version of The Sword in the Stone (1963) -- brought him, but it must also be attributed to the pleasure he took in lecturing.

The last entry in America at Last: The American Journal of T. H. White (1965) is dated 16 December 1963. White was found dead of a heart attack in his cabin aboard the S.S. Exeter in Piraeus, the port of Athens, Greece, on 17 January 1964. He is buried in Athens near Hadrian's Arch under a stone that reads "T. H. White, 1906-1964, Author Who from a Troubled Heart Delighted Others Loving and Praising This Life."